I realize it's been almost 2 months since I last updated, but a lot's been going on. So, I'll just start with my trip to NYC on March 14.I went up to visit my friend Carly for the first time since she's been living there (which is going on like 3 years). I'd been to NYC three times before, but never just to explore. There was always something that had to be done. But this time, I got to explore and had a great friend as my guide.
There wasn't really anything specific that I was dying to see, so instead we just chose a route that would get me through all the neighborhoods I hadn't seen. So we took the train to Times Square and started there. We walked our way down to Greenwich Village moving on to Tribeca and SoHo and finding ourselves in the Financial District at 5 pm. That's a scary place to be at that hour, let me tell you. We also stumbled upon the Fannie Mae bull, which was surrounded by tourists so we did a quick walk-by snapshot of the two of us. It was cute. Then we proceeded to take the Staten Island ferry there and back, and along the way I taught some tourists how to use their camera.
NYC is a pretty interesting place. It's crazy how you can walk from one neighborhood to the other and feel like you're in completely different places. If I were to move there, I'd love to live in the Village. It's so quite and pretty, but everything is still right there at your finger tips. We came across this tiny hole-in-the-wall, soul-food diner called The Pink Tea Cup where we shared some fritters and coffee. It was totally delish.
I also happened to be in NYC for St. Patty's day. Let me tell you, that was pretty insane. Carly and I decided it'd be a great idea to start the day with Irish Coffees and walk to Central Park (since I still hadn't seen it) and drink beers out of paper bags. So, we packed a backpack with snacks and ventured out back into the city. We were walking around and heard the beats of drums and the sounds of bagpipes from across the park so we followed the sound and found ourselves watching the St. Patty's day parade. It was pretty freaking awesome. Being in NYC on St. Patty's day drinking beer in the park. Awesome. So we watched the parade for a while and decided it was time to get serious and head to the bars. We met up with her BF and all of his buddies from Brooklyn at some bar, somewhere. Probably called O'Reilly's or something... or maybe no, it was McFadden's. There. That's it. Started our party there, where I discovered it's apparently ok for cops to party in uniform if they're from NY. Interesting. We moved on from there to I don't even know where. We'd made the smart decision to smuggle in a small bottle of Jameson's to the bar. Excellent idea when meeting new people on a drunk holiday. We bar hopped from bar to bar stopping to eat slices of NY pizza in between. It was a pretty good night.
All in all NYC was pretty fun. I have no idea if I could actually ever live there or not. Maybe in the nice quiet neighborhoods where it doesn't feel like the sitting is caving in on you. There's defintely never a dull moment though. We'll see... it might be my calling in the near future.
Stay tuned for the next post: 10 days in Israel.
